Founder & CEO, Parallel Wireless; Cazena, Technology Ventures

Professional experience

Steve Papa has been part of reimagining the technology landscape for over 20 years. He serves as a director and mentor sponsoring the creation of a wide variety of technology companies in software, mobile, and telecommunications (including many that he has founded).

As a CEO of Parallel Wireless, heleads the senior management team in setting the company’s strategic direction and is guiding the company’s evolution from its successful first customer deployment into broad commercialization and growth. Parallel Wireless’ innovation in making cellular network as easy and cost effective to deploy and maintain as Wi-Fi and excellence has been recognized with 9 industry awards and a nomination to the “Fierce 15″ list as a technology startup of great potential. The largest LTE provider in Europe has teamed up with Parallel Wireless to deliver reliable coverage to 1,500 rural sites by 2017 making it the largest outdoor small cell deployment worldwide.

Steve founded Endeca in 1999 – the first in-memory big-data database made possible by Moore’s law commoditizing 4GB memory. As Endeca’s founder/CEO he grew the company until it was Oracle’s 6th largest acquisition ever (reported at $1.1 billion in 2011 announcement).

He was part of the team creating Akamai that reimagined global Internet content distribution — now carrying peaks of 15 terabits/s of web traffic on any given day — and led the team at Inktomi that reimagined the network cache to create carrier class caching.

Earlier he worked with AT&T Teradata where enterprise computing was reimagined with the first use of Intel processors for enterprise servers.

Steve has an MBA from Harvard, a BS in Operations Research and Economics from Princeton University and is active as an advisory board member for the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at Harvard and Keller Center at Princeton.